Black Journalists Ditch Corporate Chains, Launch Indie Empires Because They’re Too Loud
KEY POINTS
- •Joy Reid left MSNBC after her show was canceled, calling corporate media 'their air' where stories get suppressed.
- •Reid launched 'The Joy Reid Show' in June through YouTube, Substack, podcasts, and TikTok with about six part-timers.
- •Her peers Roland Martin, Jemele Hill, Don Lemon, and Tiffany Cross also created independent platforms after high-profile exits.
Joy Reid’s MSNBC show 'The ReidOut' got canned, but don’t fret—she’s unshackled and busy hustling harder than ever with a six-person crew in Maryland, running a media startup on YouTube, TikTok, and Substack, juggling 350K YouTube subs and nearly 190K premium email stalkers. She coined networks 'their air,' where bosses suppress stories and scrub tweets, which inspired 'fired on her day off' clarity. Her peers - Roland 'Uncle Ro Ro' Martin, Jemele Hill, Don Lemon (whose X-verse show was canceled by Elon’s fun reboot rules), and Tiffany Cross - all exited the hamster wheel of traditional news to build fierce independent media fortresses. Reid warns mainstream media is 'cooked' and conservative billionaires are pushing outlets to their knees, channeling Ida B. Wells energy sans TikTok. Welcome to the new media jungle where surviving means owning your platform and grinding nonstop like a Black news cyborg army frank enough to go toe-to-toe with corporate overlords.
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Joy Reid left corporate cable to work 24/7 with a part-time crew because ‘liberation’ apparently means a second job without weekends.
So Joy Reid left MSNBC, only to clock more hours with a smaller team—freedom tastes suspiciously like hustle cult.
Black journalists kicked off corporate stages are now running their own messy but rebellious media concerts. No gatekeepers, just more burnout.
Source: Axios | Published: 12/13/2025 | Author: Delano Massey
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